Google has the means to prevent another “Trump situation” in 2020 by throttling conservative voices across its platforms. Executives at the firm seem willing to exercise it, according to new footage released by Project Veritas.
A Google insider blew the whistle on the search giant's suppression of conservative content creators on YouTube and Google News.
“They’re going to redefine a reality based on what they think is fair and based upon what they want, and what and is part of their agenda,” – Google whistleblower
The Project Veritas investigation unmasked the Google’s plans to affect the outcome of the 2020 elections. It is backed up by testimony from the insider, leaked internal documents, and an undercover video of a senior Google executive.
“They’re going to redefine a reality based on what they think is fair and based upon what they want, and what and is part of their agenda,” the Google insider said.
In the video, Google’s Head of Responsible Innovation Jen Gennai criticizes Elizabeth Warren’s “misguided” suggestions on “breaking up Google”. She explains “smaller companies don’t have the resources,” unlike Google, to “prevent the next Trump situation.”
The Google executive appears to hold the company partially responsible for the election of President Donald Trump.
Gennai works in the same division run by Kent Walker, a Google VP who assured employees “history is on our side”. Walker urged Google staff to work against the rise of populism and nationalism.
“Elizabeth Warren is saying we should break up Google. And like, I love her but she’s very misguided. Like that will not make it better it will make it worse. Because all these smaller companies who don’t have the same resources that we do will be charged with preventing the next Trump situation. It’s like, a small company cannot do that.”
“We all got screwed over in 2016, again it wasn’t just us. It was, the people got screwed over, the news media got screwed over, like. Everybody got screwed over so we’re rapidly been like, 'what happened there and how do we prevent it from happening again?'”
“We’re also training our algorithms, like, if 2016 happened again, would we have, would the outcome be different?”
Gennai’s department monitors and evaluates the implementation of artificial intelligence technologies in the company’s search algorithms. It provides recommendations on altering search results and content curation.
Crucially, the department provides Google with an editorial direction.
The insider says the company uses Machine Learning Fairness as one of its “many tools” to promote a political agenda. He provided documents to back up the allegation.
The insider provided search examples that shows how it works.
Typing “women can” into the search engine provides auto-completed results empowering to women. Conversely, typing “men can” provides results intended to break gender stereotypes. “Men can get pregnant,” “men can have periods,” and “men can cook" are some of the new results.
[caption id="attachment_178846" align="aligncenter" width="740"]
Google's Machine Learning Fairness in action[/caption]
Other leaked documents claim Google actively prioritizes content from some news publishers over others. They even show how the company makes these determinations.
One document titled “Fake News-letter” promotes a goal of establishing a “single point of truth” for the definition of “news”. Google says it removes "low-quality sources" and "misinformation".
This point is backed up by Gennai’s remarks to Project Veritas investigators:
“We have gotten accusations of around fairness is that we’re unfair to conservatives because we’re choosing what we find as credible news sources and those sources don’t necessarily overlap with conservative sources …”
The insider alleges establishment-unfriendly content creators like Dave Rubin are routinely suppressed by YouTube’s recommendation algorithms. YouTube is wholly owned by Google.
“What YouTube did is they changed the results of the recommendation engine. And so what the recommendation engine is it tries to do, is it tries to say, well, if you like A, then you’re probably going to like B. So content that is similar to Dave Rubin or Tim Pool, instead of listing Dave Rubin or Tim Pool as people that you might like, what they’re doing is that they’re trying to suggest different, different news outlets, for example, like CNN, or MSNBC, or these left leaning political outlets.”
The insider’s remarks have been backed up by content creators like Lauren Chen, who remarked on Twitter that since March, she noticed that her usually popular videos were “not only getting fewer views, but they weren’t getting recommended by the system anymore.”
Chen backed up her observations with data showing a severe drop in recommended views—from a peak of 40.7 per cent in May 2018 all the way down to 9.2 per cent in May 2019.
“As it stands, channel[s] like mine are in YouTube purgatory,” remarked Chen. “Our channels aren’t deleted, but we’re not growing since our content isn’t being offered to new viewers. YouTube is filtering what it recommends through an ideological bias. This is NOT how ‘platforms’ behave.”
Amid evidence that Google exercises a political bent, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley is currently fighting to strip social media platforms like YouTube of their Section 230 protections.
Google and YouTube hold a virtual monopoly on both search engines and online video, respectively, with zero oversight to ensure political or social equity.
Some users are moving to privacy oriented search engines such as DuckDuckGo.
The findings of this latest investigation raises major concerns about Google’s influence on the upcoming 2020 U.S. elections.
